Now that you’ve decided to jump on the Twitter bandwagon to gain maximum benefits for your business, what do you do next? Getting an impressive Twitter profile and getting a high-quality targeted ‘following’ is only half the battle won. The other important half is to maintain and increase your Twitter following in order to grow your business. Nothing works better than effective tweets in order to enhance your business’ reputation on Twitter.

I’ve come across many online marketers who build sophisticated tweet plans detailing when to tweet and how to decide your tweeting audience. Unfortunately, they miss the most important aspect regarding the anatomy of effective tweets – the content of their tweets.

The Effective Tweets

So, what are the rules that determine the anatomy of effective tweets? I strongly believe that there are none. In my experience, rules often limit one’s imagination and Twitter is the best place to show your imagination and get the maximum benefits out of it. However, I recommend that Twitter users must follow the simple guideline that an effective tweet is one that makes a positive impact on its readers.

Informational + Interesting

As a business, you must ensure that your tweets are a perfect mix of information and interesting content. Plain un-interesting information has little appeal and similarly, interesting tweets but with little substance fail to attract readers.

I’m all for adding a tinge of humor in order to make your tweets fun to read. However, it does not give you the right to ridicule your business competitors or use abusive language. Use a courteous language – it works well!

Hash Tags

In my opinion, hash tags are one of the most powerful yet heavily underutilized features on Twitter. No matter how effective your tweets are, their reach is limited till you add the right hashtags in order to spread the word in Tweetverse.

Hashtags attach your tweets to any subject and make it easily searchable. Though many Twitter users have a tendency of put hashtags at the end of their tweets, I recommend using them either at the beginning or in the middle of your tweets. This has 2 advantages – your hashtags don’t get ripped off when others retweet your messages and they save space without taking away the readability of your tweets.

Links

Plain vanilla tweets do not classify as effective tweets. As a business, your tweeting goal is to bring traffic to your website. It’s handy to include links in your tweets and encourage users in a subtle way to explore them further. Long URLs are a perfect recipe for disaster on Twitter as they take up expensive real estate out of the 140 character limit. Using a URL shortener service like http://bit.ly is highly recommended for writing effective tweets linking to your website.

Retweet

It’s fair to say that retweets multiply the power of your original tweets. Whether it’s other users retweeting your messages or you retweeting your followers’ tweets, retweeting is a good practice.

When to tweet

A good tweet is only as good as its timing. If you flood your followers with a large number of effective tweets, it turns them into ‘ineffective tweets’. The content as well as the timing of your tweets is crucial. You shouldn’t tweet on an aggressive schedule as it may lead to unwarranted spamming. Similarly, if you don’t tweet enough, your followers may not find it enticing enough to continue following you.

If you’ve any guidelines or suggestions on what constitutes the anatomy of effective tweets, please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.